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| 0241441609
| 9780241441602
| 0241441609
| 4.53
| 60
| Nov 18, 2021
| Nov 18, 2021
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it was amazing
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This is a drop dead gorgeous book and people like us can easily waste a whole hour checking out all these great books that we know we will never get r
This is a drop dead gorgeous book and people like us can easily waste a whole hour checking out all these great books that we know we will never get round to reading. It’s really quite insane reading about books when you could be reading the actual books you’re reading about, but we do it anyway. Some names that Penguin could never get rights to - Gunter Grass, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath. But they did get the rights to a whole bundle of authors I never heard of, leading to the sadly unanswered question Who decides that these books are classics anyway? I know it’s a tough question but it hangs in the air over enterprises like this and you may have thought Henry Eliot could have devoted one little page out of the 604 to attempting to formulate a response. No such luck. But still, who’s carping. Had we but world enough and time, This catalogue, Penguin, were no crime. We'd read every volume in this list. Not even Morrissey (page 162) would be missed My bibliophilic love should grow Vaster than libraries and more slow; But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Our TBR shelves, until we die ...more |
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1
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May 13, 2023
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May 17, 2023
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May 13, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1903385679
| 9781903385678
| 1903385679
| 3.79
| 19
| unknown
| Jun 21, 2018
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it was amazing
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This book is awesome and not in a hey, did you get that job you applied for? Yeah, I did! Awesome! kind of way, no, I mean awesome like when you timid
This book is awesome and not in a hey, did you get that job you applied for? Yeah, I did! Awesome! kind of way, no, I mean awesome like when you timidly tiptoe into a lofty cathedral and look up up up, and this is because of the author Boyd Tonkin – I know, it sounds like a household appliance – darling, the Boyd Tonkin is acting up again, did you clean it out? – Aw sorry, I forgot – Awesome! (sarcastic tone of voice) – but apparently he is real. So I think we may assume that Boyd is reasonably well-read in your standard government-issue anglophone literature from Beowulf to Infinite Jest, he doesn’t actually say he is but I’d bet my complete set of Captain Beefheart original vinyl on it. But then, this book demonstrates that he is fully conversant in the literature of at least 20 other countries over four centuries. Oh yeah. Out of all that towering pile he selects these 100 best novels in translation. But what he explains is that there are some great authors you will not find in here, not because they don’t deserve it, but because he doesn’t think they have been translated well enough into English. Danilo Kis, Eileen Chang and our old friend Roberto Bolano are three such. This sounds to me as if Boyd is familiar enough with their novels in the original languages to be able to judge that their English versions are not as good as they should be. Whew, how many people could do that. But THEN, for the 100 novels he does choose, he will tell you WHICH translation to go for, meaning that he has compared all the available ones of each novel. So he will say stuff like (for Madame Bovary) : Among recent versions, those by Lydia Davis and Geoffrey Wall both excel, but the novelist Adam Thorp (2011) – who, brilliantly, employs only the English vocabulary of Flaubert’s time – achieves a flavor that approaches the dream-like strangeness of Flaubert’s hyper-realism And (regarding The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes) Alfred MacAdam’s 1991 version restores some structural idiosyncrasies of Fuentes’ text that the original translation by Sam Hileman (1964) had smoothed away. Hileman’s ventriloquism retains a striking early-sixties flavor, truculent and transgressive This is all awesome! How much reading has gone into this compact 300 page guide? A lot, is my guess. According to Goodreads as of today I have read 777 novels, a weirdly palindromic number, but when I look through this guide I feel like I haven’t even scratched the surface. Some of the usual suspects are here, Don Quixote kicks us off and in rapid succession along comes Dangerous Liaisons, The Red and the Black, Dead Souls, Lez Miz, War & Peace, and later on The Master and Margarita, Memoirs of Hadrian, If On a Winter Night a Traveller etc. But at least 80% of this stuff I had never heard of. Check out these titles Journey By Moonlight – Antal Szerb The Hive – Camilo Jose Cela The Time Regulation Institute – Hamdi Tanpinar Season Of Migration To The North – Tayeb Salih Now if anyone is interested in stats, I made notes on the origin of these 100 novels. 20 come from France. 11 from Russia. 9 each from Germany and Italy. No other country got more than four. Total number of countries represented here : 34. Surprising omissions : The Netherlands and Sweden. This is the only time I can raise an eyebrow – what? I would say. No John Ajvide Lindqvist? No Let the Right One In?? Asleep at the wheel, Boyd? For anyone wishing to expand their reader's horizon, this is unreservedly recommended. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Mar 02, 2019
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Jan 18, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 1523504455
| 9781523504459
| 1523504455
| 4.12
| 1,372
| Oct 02, 2018
| Oct 02, 2018
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it was amazing
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The breakdown of what’s in here is roughly as follows Novels – 382 Memoir/autobiography – 154 Short stories – 40 Religion – 10 Children’s – 47 Plays – 36 Tra The breakdown of what’s in here is roughly as follows Novels – 382 Memoir/autobiography – 154 Short stories – 40 Religion – 10 Children’s – 47 Plays – 36 Travel – 33 History – 72 Biography – 32 Essays – 35 Poetry – 38 Other including all the sciences – 118 It doesn’t add up exactly, because of my bad counting! SOME OTHER RANDOM OBSERVATIONS : This is a gorgeous book – it’s so diverse one’s little head is spinning. I think you probably need it! It is true that Mr Mustich’s enthusiasm for each and every one of the thousand-ish books here often sounds like a publisher’s blurb : Unique in the genre when it appeared, Stranger in a Strange Land compels immersive reading with its suspense and grace, and had immense cultural fallout during the 1960s. It continues to absorb, entertain and jostle readers today The force of Rushdie’s prose is so propulsive, the currents of story-within-story so transporting, that each page is a further winding of the crank on an enormous jack-in-a-box that explodes again and again with the wonders of living that history can never contain. Philosophical profundities and everyday realities, petty jealousies and pregnant poetry are conjured one after the other with subtle intelligence and art. Forster’s masterful absorption of the colours, tones and shadows of life and language provides an almost symphonic literary score that lifts the details of his characters and their actions into some new dimension that sets this book apart – in manner, mood and mystery – from any other you have read. There are so many memoirs/autobiographies, 95% of which I had never heard of, some are by people who played sports, and those I will not be reading! I wasn’t expecting that. There is a lot of science, food and gardening. As we can see from the almost 50 children’s books, like The Secret of the Old Clock, Little House in the Big Woods, Little Bear, Goodnight Moon, etc, this is not a big list for all adults to plough through religiously. I’m a bit suspicious about whether James Mustich has really read all of this stuff – I know, heresy! But ignoring the easy peasy lemon squeezy stuff, there is a LOT of big fat fundamentals-of-human-thought type material here. Has JM really read All the Bible, ALL the Koran, ALL of Proust, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, The Tale of Genji, War & Peace, Black Lamb & Grey Falcon, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Godel Escher & Bach, Freud, Marx, the complete stories of Clarice Lispector….? (sound of reviewer slumping to the ground). Of the 380 or so novels, I have read 131 and only disliked 13 so that’s a good hit rate. There are a great number of oddball choices here. I noticed no Handmaid’s Tale, no James Baldwin (except his essays), no Last Exit to Brooklyn, no Martin Amis, no Paul Auster, no George Gissing, no Bernhard, no Pilgrim’s Progress, but he does have room for House Made of Dawn by N Scott Momaday, All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West, Fer-de-Lance by Rex Stout and The Spare Room by Helen Garner, none of which I had heard of. Well, I could go on like this. There are also some pulpy choices he includes companionably, so we can have a good laugh now and then. So in these pages you will find The Da Vinci Code, The Firm by John Grisham, The Silence of the Baa-Lambs and From Russia with Love. So, The Da Vinci Code but no Last Exit to Brooklyn, hey? What a joker. But this is nit-picking. I will be finding why-didn’t-I-already-know-about-this books in here for a long while to come. Brilliant. ...more |
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1
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Dec 20, 2019
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Dec 20, 2019
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Dec 14, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0307379078
| 9780307379078
| 0307379078
| 4.32
| 53
| Nov 07, 2017
| Nov 07, 2017
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it was amazing
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Another of those big books which will take years to read and absorb. This really fills a gap for me – there are any number of guides to albums from th
Another of those big books which will take years to read and absorb. This really fills a gap for me – there are any number of guides to albums from the rock (post Elvis) period. This book covers the earlier stuff, from the 40s up to the early 60s. In great, exhausting but delightful detail. Each album gets a historical introduction, the singer, composers and accompanists are all placed in context, and only then does WF dive into a track by track consideration of the album. Every song is turned into a mini-essay. The music is celebrated and explored without beating the non-musician reader up with technical terms. Even if you don’t love, maybe even don’t like this or that album (Blue Rose by Rosemary Clooney was not for me) it’s still interesting stuff. So this is a book music fans can wallow around in for hours & hours. Of the 57 albums WF writes about in detail the majority are from the years 1955 to 1962. The big interpreters of the Great American Songbook (I wish there was a better name for it) are all here – Tony Bennett, Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Mel Torme, Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, Chet Baker, Nina Simone, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington. Ain’t nobody going to argue with any of those. But then he promotes into the category of “great” a handful of singers who maybe never really had an especially glowing reputation and certainly never get mentioned in hip circles no more : Rosemary Clooney, Jo Stafford, Kaye Starr, and yes, Doris Day and yes, yes, Bing Crosby. [image] (Jo Stafford - she really wasn't a goddess, just a great singer, but in them days they thought they had to goddess them up for the photoshoot.) Then we get a layer of hard core jazzers and popstrels I had never paid any attention to before now – June Christy, Blossom Dearie, Marilyn Maye, Jimmy Scott, Billy Eckstine, Matt Dennis, Bobby Troup, Johnny Hartman, Bobbie Short. I am working my way through this vast book but slowly. WF has already introduced me to a couple of great albums I would never have heard of/bothered my pretty head about – Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music by Ray Charles (1962) was one – Ray Charles is for me one of those taken-for-granted situations. Yes, we all know he was one of the all time beloved voices but I for one just never listened to him aside from What’d I Say and Hit the Road Jack. But now I have – wow! And the other guy was likewise kind of yeah-yeah-whatever, Tony Bennett – the oldest crooner on the planet, the coolest guy alive (now that Leonard Cohen’s dead) but eh, maybe a bit boring and predictable. Now I have heard The Tony Bennett/Bill Evans Album, praise the Lord, I’m converted to the church of Bennett! Guy’s brilliant! As is Bill Evans (piano)! There are ups and downs to be experienced in this epic musical journey. I already knew & loved Jo Stafford but listening to WF’s chosen Doris Day albums (Day by Day and Day by Night) was not a good experience. Like her 50s Hollywood image, her voice is too perfect, too controlled. But then came an album I had heard of but never heard, Judy at Carnegie Hall – what could possibly go wrong – it’s Judy Garland. Turned out that by 1962 all she could do was shriek and blare and vibrato a song to death, Judy who in the 40s only had to sing two notes to overturn your heart. The strangest choice he throws in here, and I’m sure it’s just to aggravate the pompous, is God Bless Tiny Tim by Tiny Tim (1968). Ha haah! I already had this album and it’s a masterpiece of alternative thinking, not to say alternative singing. Mr Tim has about four voices he uses, including the well known very frightening falsetto. The “normal” baritone he can switch on if he so pleases is perfectly pleasant – he’s like a musical poster boy for multiple personality disorder. I too recommend Tiny Tim! [image] Tiny with another singer Andy Williams, who did not make it into this book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Jul 20, 2018
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Mar 06, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1844571939
| 9781844571932
| 1844571939
| 4.24
| 191
| 1985
| Dec 31, 2007
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liked it
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I watch a lot of movies but I never review any of them. It’s strange, there are so many great online reviewers of films, but not of books, or at least
I watch a lot of movies but I never review any of them. It’s strange, there are so many great online reviewers of films, but not of books, or at least, the non-YA books I’m interested in. (With the exception of my dear GR friends of course!) Maybe it’s because you can watch a movie in two hours, and not even the speed-readiest person can get through a novel in that time. (Except a graphic novel, damn, there are always exceptions.) The Cinema Book is a huge thing, you could brain the home invaders in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games with it, and it’s also extremely pretty with pix on every page and a jillion capsule essays about individual movies all the way through. The blurb says this book is “widely regarded as the ultimate guide to cinema”. I have been reading it on and off for months now. What’s not to love about this magnificent beast? Readability, is what. This is not a guide for the ordinary punter, the movie fan who slurps up V/H/S/2 followed by Rome Open City followed by Don’t Breathe followed by The Brood followed by Gentlemen Prefer Blondes followed by Zero Dark Thirty followed by The Neon Demon, to namedrop a few I saw recently. This a guide for those hapless miserable wretched of the earth who are doing FILM STUDIES and know their mise en scene from their deep focus and their DW Griffiths from their DW Washburn (an obscure Monkees single – you knew that). These poor abandoned creatures have to learn a new language, called FILMSPEAK. This book is written in FILMSPEAK. It goes like this. The concepts of commodities, signs and exchange value suggest a model in which a homology might be established between the circulation of the star image in a circuit of exchange value that produced profit (production, distribution, exhibition)and its circulation in a circuit of semiotic use value (performance, publicity and spectatorship) that produces pleasure. (p111) A number of studies have appeared that either question any absolute distinction between comedian and narrative, situational or “polite” forms of comedy, or seek to draw attention to the presence of the latter in early films and this to question or modify the ways in which the early history of comedy in the cinema - and the careers of particular comic performers – have been written. P271 In Koch’s view, the vamp is a phallic woman rather than a fetishized woman, as she offers contradictory images of femininity that go beyond the reifying gaze…. P495 Studlar argues that visual pleasure in cinema resembles the psychic processes of masochism rather than sadism. Cinema evokes the desire of the spectator to return to the pre-oedipal phase of unity with the mother, and of bisexuality. P495 (Rich pickings on p 495!) So FILM STUDIES along the way absorbed the concepts and language of many other disciplines – psychology, semiotics, Marxism, sociology, feminism, queer theory, post-structuralism and so on. Do film students have to read up on all that stuff as well as watching every Eisenstein and Jean-Luc Godard movie and understanding vertical market integration? How utterly exhausting. Or do they just watch The House of 1000 Corpses and skip through this book and busk it when the exams come along? Well, I did find some stuff I could use (= I could understand) in here but it was thin on the ground. So, heck, this is a textbook, and I didn’t quite realise that when I got it. The Cinema Book is so young and attractive, like Tuesday Weld in Pretty Poison (Noel Black, 1968) but it’ll leave you gasping on a hospital bed with tubes all over before it’s done with you. You have been warned. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 07, 2017
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Jul 07, 2017
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Jul 07, 2017
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0786407425
| 9780786407422
| 0786407425
| 4.17
| 6
| Feb 2000
| Feb 01, 2000
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it was amazing
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I just wanted to flag this one up for anyone interested - in my opinion we need more reader's guides to novels and this obscurity from the year 2000 i
I just wanted to flag this one up for anyone interested - in my opinion we need more reader's guides to novels and this obscurity from the year 2000 is really great. It reviews 1033 novels (by 710 novelists) published between 1990 and 1998, dividing them into eight fairly vague genres, but there's enough small print in these 480 pages to keep you coming back for years. Linda came to the conclusion that the novel is not dead. I see no compelling reason to disagree with that. ...more |
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0
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not set
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not set
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Jul 04, 2016
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Paperback
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| 3.64
| 91
| Dec 25, 2012
| May 08, 2014
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liked it
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I need to update this review. When I got this six years ago I thought it was harebrained and kind of silly, but over the years I've picked it up and f
I need to update this review. When I got this six years ago I thought it was harebrained and kind of silly, but over the years I've picked it up and found 30 minutes slipped by easily on many occasions. I STILL don't quite get what it's for except that if there are some novels you know you definitely won't read but you're curious about you can get a detailed and sardonic summary of the whole plot here. Now, you have to go over these entries with a magnifying glass to find any clue to whether Prof Sutherland actually liked the book or not. You might assume that he did, because it’s included here, but wait -THIS ISN’T A GUIDE. Check it out : in the preface, he says This book is not a guide, a reference book, or a “best of” compilation Now, what does it say on the title page… here, lemme quote that for you: A GUIDE TO 500 GREAT NOVELS I guess John Sutherland musta had a slapped-brow head-desk moment when he got his preview copy. [image] "I told them, I told them" Well, leaving that ridiculousness aside, what IS this thick wedge of a book? He says The intention in what follows is to share a lifelong enthusiasm for that wonderful human invention, the prose novel. John Sutherland must think these entries sparkle with his lifelong enthusiasm for novels, but maybe it’s the same enthusiasm that undertakers have for corpses – they love them and care for them deeply but you’d never know to look at them. Professional and reserved at all times but with the merest hint of humour on occasion. But this not-guide does have a point for me however, because it does mention a whole host of novels I’d never heard of or, if I had, never had any intention of reading. Examples from first category: Hanta Yo : Ruth Beebe Hill Left Behind : Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Outerbridge Reach : Robert Stone The Old Men at the Zoo : Angus Wilson And second category: The Rats : James Herbert Riders of the Purple Sage : Zane Grey The Groves of Academe : Mary McCarthy The Good Earth : Pearl S Buck So it’s kinda useful for that. Anyway, I do like books about books, I know they’re a bit porny but hey, this is the site where people like to sniff books, follow books in the street, stalk books, dress books up in uniforms, probably marry books for all I know. ...more |
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1
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Jan 15, 2015
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Nov 16, 2021
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Jan 17, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0375709401
| 9780375709401
| 0375709401
| 4.23
| 704
| Jan 01, 1975
| Nov 16, 2004
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it was amazing
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Following Kirk's lead here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... I promised him my own films-so-far list. The first 6 months is a lot of me catching Following Kirk's lead here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... I promised him my own films-so-far list. The first 6 months is a lot of me catching up with stuff - whaddayamean you never saw La Strada?? That kind of thing. JANUARY 360 Multiple storylines, multiple stars, hated by critics drinking in bars But it was all right, to quote Paul Simon, in a limited kind of way for an off night Appropriate Behaviour An American indie where we follow an awkward young woman around for a couple of hours – it could be Greta Gerwig as Frances Ha or it could be Desiree Akhavan as Shirin, I don’t care, it’s all good A Pigeon sat on a Branch Contemplating Existence An utter ineffable arthouse turkey, much bedrooled over by critics, may the devil rot their bowels Shampoo I never saw it, and no surprise, when I had seen it it was exactly like I thought it would be except less cynical. Europa Europa Julie Delpy does a good turn as a gorgeous teenager who befriends the Jewish-boy-passing-as-Aryan and turns out to be not nice at all, in fact a committed Nazi. Solid movie but not really essential. La Strada Here you find the beginning of a trend – me catching up on some major 60s auteur work. Fellini, no less – that’s like reading Thomas Mann or Italo Calvini – the real deal – and it was just strange. Mrs Fellini plays a heartbreaking child-woman with only half a brain and she is mesmerizing and almost heartbreaking except most of the movie is truly stupid and pompous and symbolic. Fifty Shades of Grey I had to see this (no, really) just to find out what the deal actually was – I ain’t going to read the book after all. There are a lot of tastefully photographed buttocks but no frontocks. Wimps! Parkland I’ve tried to stay away from the whole JFK mental whirlpool but this movie has kind of dragged me back towards the vortex of horror…. From reading about this I discovered that Vincent Bugliosi has written the worlds longest refutation of all conspiracy theories and the CT fans have rebutted his rebuttal and so on; anyway this was going to be a miniseries but turned into a decent movie which all the CT fans probably have evenings where they freeze every other frame to point out how completely inaccurate it is. Joy A great movie about mops. A pretty good movie about a woman trying to create her own business. Judged by more exacting standards, it’s an odd duck. I liked it. You can’t not like J-Law. Love and Mercy The Brian Wilson biopic which I steered clear of then capitulated. Being a major fan I did not want this to be anything less than brilliant, and – holy sandboxes and wind chimes, it is! It’s like they were actually there filming the Pet Sounds sessions! Brooklyn Gorgeous to look at and a movie with no unpleasant people in it at all. So, this movie is an antidote to everything else. Amy I had always written off Amy Winehouse as another modern r&b diva – until I bothered to listen to her album, which is full of retro-50s and 60s sounds and proper tunes. Again, I ummed and awed about seeing this, then I did. It’s so completely sad. She starts off so sassy and confident and sparkling , and she ends up carried out the house in a body bag, which they filmed and included. February 45 Years I couldn’t see what the deal was here – so he’s been in love before he married his wife? So who hasn’t ? But critics love aged actors being given entire films to themselves. Carol Hmm, Joy Carol, Brooklyn, Amy – I’m seeing a pattern. And here’s another – Angele Merkel, Hillary Clinton, Nicola Sturgeon, Theresa May. This was another beautiful looking movie but for my money Blue is the Warmest Colour edges it out. To Be or Not to Be Catching up on old screwball comedies – this one was a landmark of tastelessness (making fun of the Nazis) & Carol Lombard was kinda funny but critics overplay Carol Lombard. Honeymoon Indie horror that was everything bad about indie horror Breathless Godard mostly sucks – I guess you can sometimes see his point, but, like Andy Warhol, you don’t want to be beat over the head with it for 90 minutes. He chose cute actors and he ran around in Paris and he loved gangster B movies. Yes, good for Jean-Luc. Next! Nothing Sacred Another 30s screwball – a fairly savage go at tabloid journalism; It Happened One Night is better, and Ace in the Hole is not a comedy and even better. My Man Godfrey Another 30s screwball - wow, you could write a huge diatribe about Hollywood comedy. Talk about class warfare – by the rich on the poor! These were the movies Dickens would have loved, ending up with a kooky rich guy saving the day. March The Grifters A Jim Thompson novel into film and really rubbish, dull, limp, nasty and if they brained each other or shot each other who gave a flook. The Magnificent Ambersons Wow, Orson Welles, another critics darling, but not mine – this is so creaky and tiresome. Okay, so the studio hacked it up; so don’t keep going on about it then! Avoid. The Falling Strange story about mass hysteria or something amongst some British schoolgirls – seems to have been made so we have something to compare with Picnic at hanging Rock. Kill Your Darlings Had to see this when I was reading my Kerouac biography – what an odd slice of literary sleaziness to make a movie about. Quite well done and all, but, er, why ? On the Road As above – wow, this was awful. You know how they say some books are unfilmable? Sometimes they’re right. Don’t do it. This is why they say that. Tower Block British horror with no merit whatsoever except it has a performance by Jack O’Connell, the best young British actor of the moment. He is fierce. April Dear Diary A loopy Italian meandering guy-films-his-own-life where you never know what’s coming next but it will be quite funny. I loved this – totally recommended. I’m so Excited Pedro Almodovar goes over the deep end – I can take quite a lot of camping around but this was way beyond my limits. Or was it just that it thought it was being hilarious and it wasn’t? Mr Almodovar’s earlier movies are totally recommended so this was a major disappointment. Shanghai Express This proves that – sadly – some old Hollywood “classics” which doggedly turn up in all lists of great movies are now UNWATCHABLE. The Lady Eve Another screwball, and hopefully the LAST – these movies, beloved of so many film buffs, are just dreadful, it must be said. Spotlight Excellent hard-core reporting movie which – as Avatar was the same plot as Pocahontas – has the same plot as All the President’s Men, and an equally downbeat ending. Must see! The Big Short This is another based-on-reality movie which is – with reservations – another must see. Some of the methods used to jazz up the boring bits where they have to explain what derivatives are were terrible (a girl in a bubble bath in 2015??) but still, this film mostly rocks, and it does explain a lot about the 2007 crash. The Lady in the Van See 45 years above, but I did grudgingly like this one! Viridiana Another one where film buffs swoon, and if it was 1959 I can see I would be swooning too, but it ain’t 1959. May Thieves Like Us A beautiful empty Altman movie I had never seen. One of these where a) you really like it, b) you think it’s not a very good movie and c) you’ll never recommend it to anyone Videodrome (rewatch) Wow, this is unhinged – too many ideas, some of them really bad ones… But the video-slot-in-the-stomach and Debbie Harry acting is unarguable. This is probably a really terrible movie, but it’s too weird to tell. The Double Life of Veronique This one is stunning, featuring the breathtaking Irene Jacob. I think it’s like if Sliding Doors was rewritten by Thomas Aquinas. Must see! Welcome to Leith A documentary about some horrible American Nazis who try to take over a tiny little town. Interesting but after Catfish I’m not so sure I believe what I’m seeing in these documentaries. Henry Portrait of a Serial Killer (rewatch) Still as grim as I remembered and there aren’t many movies out there which strike this depressed disgusted blue collar tone, usually they like to art-house their serial killers. It’s an achievement, but a real unpleasant one. Not recommended! The Survivalist Irish indie about yes, a guy who’s survived a walking dead collapse of civilization but there aren’t any zombies, just a mother and a daughter who find his lonesome cottage and want to move in and eat his vegetables. The makers of this movie must have found out about the Walking Dead later, and gone awwwww…. L’Avventura Another art house classic where rich Italians mooch around and do the moody staring. Not recommended. Single White Female (rewatch) There was so much casual nudity in this film, I had quite forgotten how things used to be, but aren’t now. I thought this one stood up really well. Recommended! June Sing Street We went to the cinema for this one and loved it! Who wouldn’t? It’s the feel-like-a-teenager-again movie of the year. Recommended! Do the Right Thing (rewatch) Classic – totally recommended. This was when Spike Lee was great and not pompous. Every scene in this movie rings like a bell. And there are a lot of scenes. Energy, young cast, John Turturro, blah blah – must see! Cruel Intentions (rewatch) This is the teenage version of Les liaisons Dungarees (thank you spellcheck) and mostly it’s off the chart creepy and prurient, so if you want a cheesy did-that-just-happen did-she-just-say-that sex uncomedy starring Buffy the Vampire Slayer at her buffiest, this is the one stop shop. Aguirre, Wrath of God (rewatch) Hmmm, welllll, the march of time stomps cruelly onwards and it's hard not to guffaw inappropriately when guys get shot in unconvincing ways and particularly when one guy gets his head lopped off... Klaus Kinski lurching around the raft was good but really this may have just been a load of old bollocks. La Haine (rewatch) Red-hot movie of young French louts from the ugly poor suburbs of Paris - sort of a modern French version of Mean Streets - great central performance, wonderful camera leaping around, beautiful black & white - must see! July Independence Day : Resurgence OMG – me and my daughter like to see these world-smashing bustblockers like San Andreas and The Day After Tomorrow but we should have listened to the rest of you on this turkey – it’s terrible. ...more |
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| May 12, 2014
| May 12, 2014
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it was amazing
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UPDATE I still think this mighty beast is great but it’s great like the Grand Canyon and quite often when I read a paragraph I get a feeling that Micha UPDATE I still think this mighty beast is great but it’s great like the Grand Canyon and quite often when I read a paragraph I get a feeling that Michael Schmidt is just too clever/cultured/informed/lofty for the likes of me. I mean, great God, he’s read like everything… is he 200 years old or does he have the time stopping power of The Fermata like in Nicholson Baker? Here’s an example. On p74 he discusses Daniel Defoe. (I have only read Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.) He contrasts Defoe with Aphra Behn, a novelist very few people now read, so he has me at an advantage already. I have to take his word for all things Aphra related. What Defoe has and Behn lacks is a developed dissenting conscience. This gives his novels, in a first person that is dogmatically rooted, focus and direction. Like her, he writes for effect, but the effects he strives for are moral, a morality anachronistic and problematic. 1) What does he mean by “dissenting”? I think he’s referring to the special historical meaning of this word relating to the established Church. If so, the meaning is not very clear. If not, the meaning is totally unclear. 2) What does he mean by “dogmatically”? What opinions are being blindly asserted here, by Defoe or by Crusoe? I had remembered Crusoe the character to be the embodiment of pragmatism, not dogmatism. 3) “Like her, he writes for effect” – what does that mean? Every writer writes for effect, the effect on the reader. A billion different effects, of course, but some effect. So this seems nonsensical too. 4) Why is Defoe's morality described as "anachronistic"? Schmidt does not care to explain. I think that within the Schmidt brain everything is crystal clear, but his compressed writing for me often obscures the points he wants to make. Compressed, in a book of 1100 pages! So I’m just throwing in that reading this book can make you feel like a dimwit. THE ORIGINAL REVIEW Although I have been glomming this giant book greedily for the last few days (what does he says about DeLillo? Really? What about Gass/Gaddis/Pynchon? Ha! I thought so), it’s not something you can sit down & read like a normal book (god help the actual real-world reviewers who have to at least try to); not unless you want to put your life & your actual novel-reading on hold for a month or so, which I don’t. So it’s one of those perennially fascinating big creatures like David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film or Peter Watson’s A Terrible Beauty. You’ll be picking it up & putting it down for years. From what I’ve read so far, The Novel : A Biography is highly recommended to everybody who reads novels, which is pretty much all of us here, I think. But it is a bit peculiar. Firstly, there are two strange things about my copy – on the spine it says the title : “A Life of the Novel” and not “The Novel: A Biography” as it does in the title page. That’s odd, so maybe this is some early version. Which might explain why I can’t find any NOTES in this giant book. You know that every book with any scholarly intention has NOTES which tell you exactly where the various quotations used in the book come from. Often at the bottom of each page as footnotes, or more usually a fat section at the back of the book. This is an essential part of the production. Otherwise, our author might just be making up his quotes. Prof Schmidt uses thousands of quotations throughout this book, because one of the main things is, he likes to set authors discussing each other, and he thinks following these conversations is one of the most enlightening things a novel reader can do. So I need the NOTES and there aren’t any, at all! Where are they? Who stole them? At the end of the book there is a Timeline and an index and that’s all! Okay, I don’t NEED the notes but I feel this book is going about in public with no trousers on if it has no notes. Second, Schmidt’s method is to advance crabwise through time. For instance, he has a chapter provocatively called “Propaganda” and here we find Isherwood, Paul and Jane Bowles, Henry Green, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene… yes, all fairly congruent… but also Edmund White, RK Narayan, Caryl Phillips and Timothy Mo. He throws some unlikely bedfellows together. In other chapters, Donald Barthelme meets GK Chesterton; Nabokov befriends Franzen; Kafka picks up Martin Amis’s car keys. Third, he says he had no Big Theory about the Novel, but I did find this mission statement in the introduction: A few novels ask to be re-read and become living parts of memory that affect how we hear, speak, see, feel and act. Those novels and their authors are this book’s quarry But this is not 1001 Books you Must Read And Then You Will Die, Die, I Say, Die; more like 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, by Jane Smiley (also recommended) – a serious zigzag paraglide through all the cloudy worlds of words we find so beguiling and so necessary, One for the Christmas wish list. ...more |
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| 184018504X
| 9781840185041
| 184018504X
| 4.56
| 91
| Oct 08, 1999
| Jun 01, 2004
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it was amazing
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Update. You can only read this book a few pages at a time, it's very upsetting. It gives you like no other account I ever read the details of urban gue Update. You can only read this book a few pages at a time, it's very upsetting. It gives you like no other account I ever read the details of urban guerilla war. I'll give one example. On 9 August 1971 running gun battles erupted between the IRA, the Protestant militias and the British Army. It was chaos. 12 people died in one night. Here's one of the 12 deaths : A reporter from the Irish Times named Kevin Myers was in the middle of it. He was in a house and was shot at by some sniper from a house across the road. A soldier who was down in the street shot at the sniper and the reporter thought that saved his life. He ran down to the street to get away from the madness. He saw three kids throwing stones at the soldiers from an alley between two houses. He told them there was shooting going on and they didn't believe him, they hadn't noticed it. Then the soldier who had just shot at the sniper thought there was another sniper in the alley where the kids were, and fired again. His shot ricocheted off a wall and fragments of the one bullet hit the three boys he couldn't even see; one lost the fingers of one hand, another lost the back of his head but survived; the third was 16 year old Leo McGuigan. I crouched beside him but he was dead to my fingers, and no blood came from the tiny hole in his cheek. We put his lifeless lolling body in a car. This was just a random car which was passing and had stopped to help. As the car began to drive away the same soldier aimed his automatic weapon at it but this time several people told him not to fire and he didn't. **** This is a five star book and I’ll probably never finish it, I’m only on page 60 of 1542 closely printed pages, it will take years. But it’s a stunning achievement, and I wanted to make a point about it. This book tells the story of every single death caused by the Troubles in Northern Ireland and England. The first one on 11 June 1966 (John Scullion, aged 28, single, storeman) all the way through to the last, on 8 May 2006 (Michael McIlveen, aged 15, schoolboy – number 3712). 2006 is when the last edition was published. There have been a few more deaths since then, but not that many. A handful. So – 3,712 death over a period of 40 years. From three year old Jonathan Ball, an English kid killed in Warrington, a town in England, when the IRA planted bombs in litter bins in a shopping mall (a 12 year old boy was also killed in that one) all the way to 91 year old Martha Smylie who was killed by a UDA bomb which was planted at the Imperial Hotel in Belfast. The bomb damaged her old peoples’ home next door and this old lady was badly injured, and died the following day. This book, with austere reserved grace gives us the people back from the statistics. If you’re interested in Northern Ireland, or civil conflict, or terrorism, or what happens when police fire into a crowd, or a car bomb goes off in a crowded street, or how people live when the ground is crumbling under their feet, this is a must have. That there should be a similar volume for the victims of all conflicts is self-evident, just as self-evidently there never will be. * Postscript: I mentioned this book to a colleague of mine, we've worked in the same office for years, and she comes from Strabane, a border town in Northern Ireland. It turned out that Number 2555, Ronnie Finlay, aged 32, Protestant, married, 3 children, factory worker, shot by the IRA on 23 August 1983 as he left his factory, was her dad's best friend. ...more |
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Mar 26, 2014
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| 0300179472
| 9780300179477
| 0300179472
| 3.96
| 174
| Mar 27, 2007
| Mar 27, 2012
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really liked it
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I wish I was as famous as little Martin Amis I would go out for a lark with Dame Muriel Spark Or be sailing a boatsy with JM Coatzee Or down on the Bower I wish I was as famous as little Martin Amis I would go out for a lark with Dame Muriel Spark Or be sailing a boatsy with JM Coatzee Or down on the Bowery with Malcolm Lowry Or eating an oyster with E M Foyster Or arguing, dammit, with Dashiel Hammett Or chatting up dames with Henry James Or bridging the gulf between me and Mrs Woolf Or watching The Full Monty with Emily Bronte…. I began this one at the same time that I was reading All These Years – Tune In. That volume takes 870 pages to tell the story of The Beatles, a popular music combo, up to 1962, the year before they were famous. Vast, oceanic detail about four working class lads in their early 20s. In Lives of the Novelists I was reading the biographies of Faulkner and Dickens condensed into 3 or four pages each. It was an amusing experience. Ironic, you might say. It was like the world turned upside down. I liked it that way round. Well, of course, if you crank out a giant compendium like this one and call it Lives of THE Novelists, not Lives of Some Novelists I happen to Like you’re going to get major flack from the reviewers, and JS had to stand up and defend himself. Robert Gottlieb, noted critic, slagged him off for including a lot of "second- and third-raters". John Sutherland responded: In any history of fiction, however angled, there will be ten thousand novelists excluded for every one included. Those excluded will, most of them, be what Mr. Gottlieb calls them: “second- and third-raters.” But not, for that reason, wholly unmemorable. The first-raters get attention enough. Having taught, for forty years, in strict curricular confines, I know well enough who the first-raters are. The book was an attempt to give some tiny sense of what lies outside those confines. I would ask Mr. Gottlieb to understand that the idiosyncratic selection he complains of was (however unsuccessfully carried out) principled, not the product of perverted judgment. This means you get Georgette Heyer but not Kathy Acker, Rex Warner but not Maya Angelou, Leslie Charteris but not Paul Bowles, Micky Spillane but not Truman Capote, Vernor Vinge but not Iain Banks, and Charles Willeford but not Anita Brookner. I could go on, you get the picture. It’s John Sutherland’s book, he makes the rules. You can’t read through the whole of this like an ordinary book, it’s for browsing and it will last you (and me) years. If you can go with the strangeness of JS’s choices, it’s a lot of fun. Postscript: The Internet sure does turn a person into a nitpicking grouch or should that be an armchair factchecker. In the entry on Patrick Hamilton JS says his play Gaslight was filmed twice, "the second time with Greta Garbo in the lead". ...more |
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Nov 09, 2013
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Oct 05, 2013
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| 1844037401
| 9781844037407
| 1844037401
| 3.81
| 2,796
| Mar 07, 2006
| Oct 01, 2012
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really liked it
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Further note, for Ben and anyone else interested in what they've added - here are 20 recent titles they've added to give you an idea. I'm sure a compr
Further note, for Ben and anyone else interested in what they've added - here are 20 recent titles they've added to give you an idea. I'm sure a comprehensive list will pop up somewhere soon. Professor Martens' Departure : Jaan Kross The Young man : Botho Strauss Love Medicine : Louise Erdrich Half of Man is Woman : Zhang Xianling Black Box : Amos Oz The First garden : Anne Hebert The Last World : ChristophRansmayr Obabakoak : Bernardo Atxaga Inland : Gerald Murnane The daughter : Pavlov Matesis Memoirs of Rain : Sunetra Gupta The Dumas Club : Arturo Perez-Reverte Before Night falls : Renaldo Arenas Remembering babylon : David malouf The Holder of the World : Bharati Mukherjee The Twins : Tessa de Loo Our Lady of the Assassins : Fernando Vallejo Santa Evita : Tomas Eloy martinez Margot and the Angels : Kristien Hemmerechts Crossfire : Miyabe Miyuki The heretic : Miguel Deliber Confession : haven't heard of ANY of these titles and only one of ther authors. So i think them describing this edition as "international" is pretty reasonable. ********** Here's the 2012 new edition, and it's very much changed. I just made some preliminary notes while other persons were watching The Great British bake-Off [image] and howling out loud because it was the final (ooh!). But anyway, I noted that this (British) edition is calling itself an "international " edition, meaning that a whole lot of mainly British and North American titles have gone gone gone and been replaced with novels from everwhere else. None of which I have heard of, which is where this big list book gets its points - it will inform people if nothing else. I only checked from 1950 onwards, but these titles are now OUT : 1. Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro 2. Saturday – Ian McEwan 3. On Beauty – Zadie Smith 4. Slow Man – J.M. Coetzee 5. Adjunct: An Undigest – Peter Manson 7. The Red Queen – Margaret Drabble 8. The Plot Against America – Philip Roth 10. Vanishing Point – David Markson 11. The Lambs of London – Peter Ackroyd 12. Dining on Stones – Iain Sinclair 14. Drop City – T. Coraghessan Boyle 15. The Colour – Rose Tremain 16. Thursbitch – Alan Garner 17. The Light of Day – Graham Swift 19. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon 20. Islands – Dan Sleigh 21. Elizabeth Costello – J.M. Coetzee 22. London Orbital – Iain Sinclair 23. Family Matters – Rohinton Mistry 24. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters 25. The Double – José Saramago 27. Unless – Carol Shields 28. Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami 29. The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor 30. That They May Face the Rising Sun – John McGahern 31. In the Forest – Edna O’Brien 32. Shroud – John Banville 33. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides 34. Youth – J.M. Coetzee 35. Dead Air – Iain Banks 37. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster 38. Gabriel’s Gift – Hanif Kureishi 41. Schooling – Heather McGowan 44. Don’t Move – Margaret Mazzantini 45. The Body Artist – Don DeLillo 46. Fury – Salman Rushdie 47. At Swim, Two Boys – Jamie O’Neill 48. Choke – Chuck Palahniuk 51. An Obedient Father – Akhil Sharma 55. The Heart of Redness – Zakes Mda 57. Ignorance – Milan Kundera 58. Nineteen Seventy Seven – David Peace 60. City of God – E.L. Doctorow 61. How the Dead Live – Will Self 63. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood 64. After the Quake – Haruki Murakami 65. Small Remedies – Shashi Deshpande 66. Super-Cannes – J.G. Ballard 67. House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski 68. Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates 69. Pastoralia – George Saunders 70. Timbuktu – Paul Auster 71. The Romantics – Pankaj Mishra 72. Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson 74. Everything You Need – A.L. Kennedy 75. Fear and Trembling – Amélie Nothomb 76. The Ground Beneath Her Feet – Salman Rushdie 78. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami 80. Intimacy – Hanif Kureishi 81. Amsterdam – Ian McEwan 82. Cloudsplitter – Russell Banks 84. The Talk of the Town – Ardal O’Hanlon 85. Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters 87. Glamorama – Bret Easton Ellis 88. Another World – Pat Barker 91. Mason & Dixon – Thomas Pynchon 94. Great Apes – Will Self 95. Enduring Love – Ian McEwan 97. Jack Maggs – Peter Carey 99. American Pastoral – Philip Roth 100. The Untouchable – John Banville 102. Cocaine Nights – J.G. Ballard 104. Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels 105. The Ghost Road – Pat Barker 112. The Information – Martin Amis 113. The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie 114. Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth 115. The Rings of Saturn – W.G. Sebald 120. Mr. Vertigo – Paul Auster 121. The Folding Star – Alan Hollinghurst 124. The Master of Petersburg – J.M. Coetzee 130. Felicia’s Journey – William Trevor 134. Trainspotting – Irvine Welsh 137. Operation Shylock – Philip Roth 138. Complicity – Iain Banks 144. The House of Doctor Dee – Peter Ackroyd 145. The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood 146. The Emigrants – W.G. Sebald 150. A Heart So White – Javier Marias 155. Jazz – Toni Morrison 159. Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates 160. The Heather Blazing – Colm Tóibín 162. Black Dogs – Ian McEwan 167. Time’s Arrow – Martin Amis 171. Downriver – Iain Sinclair 172. Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord – Louis de Bernieres 173. Wise Children – Angela Carter 176. Vineland – Thomas Pynchon 179. The Music of Chance – Paul Auster 181. A Home at the End of the World – Michael Cunningham 183. Possession – A.S. Byatt 186. A Disaffection – James Kelman 189. Billy Bathgate – E.L. Doctorow 192. The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker 197. London Fields – Martin Amis 198. The Book of Evidence – John Banville 199. Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood 201. The Beautiful Room is Empty – Edmund White 206. Libra – Don DeLillo 207. The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks 209. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams 214. The Passion – Jeanette Winterson 216. The Child in Time – Ian McEwan 217. Cigarettes – Harry Mathews 222. The Taebek Mountains – Jo Jung-rae 226. Marya – Joyce Carol Oates 232. Foe – J.M. Coetzee 237. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson 239. A Maggot – John Fowles 240. Less Than Zero – Bret Easton Ellis 244. Old Masters – Thomas Bernhard 246. Queer – William Burroughs 262. Worstward Ho – Samuel Beckett 263. Fools of Fortune – William Trevor 267. The Diary of Jane Somers – Doris Lessing 277. The Newton Letter – John Banville 279. Concrete – Thomas Bernhard 280. The Names – Don DeLillo 283. The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan 289. Rites of Passage – William Golding 292. City Primeval – Elmore Leonard 296. Shikasta – Doris Lessing 299. The Safety Net – Heinrich Böll 303. The World According to Garp – John Irving 307. Yes – Thomas Bernhard 310. The Passion of New Eve – Angela Carter 314. Petals of Blood – Ngugi Wa Thiong’o 316. The Hour of the Star – Clarice Lispector 318. Ratner’s Star – Don DeLillo 319. The Public Burning – Robert Coover 322. Amateurs – Donald Barthelme 327. Grimus – Salman Rushdie 331. High Rise – J.G. Ballard 333. Dead Babies – Martin Amis 334. Correction – Thomas Bernhard 339. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré 340. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 348. The Black Prince – Iris Murdoch 349. Sula – Toni Morrison 351. The Breast – Philip Roth 360. The Wild Boys – William Burroughs 363. The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark 364. The Ogre – Michael Tournier 366. Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick – Peter Handke 368. Mercier et Camier – Samuel Beckett 369. Troubles – J.G. Farrell 371. The Atrocity Exhibition – J.G. Ballard 377. The Green Man – Kingsley Amis 385. The Nice and the Good – Iris Murdoch 391. Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid – Malcolm Lowry 396. Chocky – John Wyndham 398. The Cubs and Other Stories – Mario Vargas Llosa 402. The Joke – Milan Kundera 405. A Man Asleep – Georges Perec 406. The Birds Fall Down – Rebecca West 407. Trawl – B.S. Johnson 416. August is a Wicked Month – Edna O’Brien 417. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater – Kurt Vonnegut 421. Come Back, Dr. Caligari – Donald Bartholme 422. Albert Angelo – B.S. Johnson 435. The Collector – John Fowles 439. The Drowned World – J.G. Ballard 452. The Violent Bear it Away – Flannery O’Connor 453. How It Is – Samuel Beckett 454. Our Ancestors – Italo Calvino 464. Henderson the Rain King – Saul Bellow 465. Memento Mori – Muriel Spark 474. Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris – Paul Gallico 476. The End of the Road – John Barth 487. The Wonderful “O” – James Thurber 492. Seize the Day – Saul Bellow 497. A World of Love – Elizabeth Bowen 505. Self Condemned – Wyndham Lewis 512. The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett 513. Watt – Samuel Beckett 516. The Adventures of Augie March – Saul Bellow 523. The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson 535. The Third Man – Graham Greene So you can see the changes are very considerable. ...more |
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Oct 16, 2012
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| 1842124447
| 9781842124444
| 1842124447
| 4.31
| 1,079
| 2000
| Jan 01, 2001
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liked it
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This is a splendid intellectual history of 20th century ideas but I'm wondering if there's any point in me finishing it as I believe my brain is actua
This is a splendid intellectual history of 20th century ideas but I'm wondering if there's any point in me finishing it as I believe my brain is actually full. I'm very concerned that every time I learn a new fact I have to forget an old one. And the one I forget might be something significant. I don't want to have to stop a policeman on the streets of Nottingham and say "Excuse me officer, could you please tell me where I live and perhaps take me back there? And on the way I'll tell you about Schrodinger's Cat, I just read about it, completely fascinating...."
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Sep 28, 2007
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| 0789313707
| 9780789313706
| 0789313707
| 3.81
| 2,796
| Mar 07, 2006
| Mar 07, 2006
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really liked it
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Has anyone thought of this already? Surely they have.... I wonder if it would be possible here on Goodreads to have a page listing all the 1001 books a Has anyone thought of this already? Surely they have.... I wonder if it would be possible here on Goodreads to have a page listing all the 1001 books and - here's the thing - links to our own reviews of them (maybe with a limit in the case of famous books with a zillion reviews). It would be an interesting resource and would encourage people to review those which haven't got any reviews at all - say, for instance, The Taebek Mountains by Jo Jung-rae or Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. It would add to the GR fray, and that is what we are here for : the fray. ** HISTORY OF THE THREE EDITIONS OF 1001 BOOKS, IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING (if you weren’t wondering then move along, nothing to see here, this is for terminal list geeks only) The original edition came out in 2006 and got a lot of stick for its eurocentricity and eccentricity – what? 10 Coetzee novels and 8 McEwans? It looked a little like bribery and corruption, or maybe the editorial board had just gone mad. So in 2008 they rethought the whole list. 282 books were dumped and new ones added. 2008 additions 1. Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2. Falling Man – Don DeLillo 3. Animal's People – Indra Sinha 4. Carry Me Down - M.J. Hyland 5. The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell 6. The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai 7. The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid 8. Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon 9. Mother's Milk - Edward St Aubyn 10. The Accidental - Ali Smith 11. Measuring the World - Daniel Kehlmann 12. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka 13. Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky 14. 2666 - Roberto Bolano 15. Small Island - Andrea Levy 16. The Swarm - Frank Schatzing 17. The Book about Blanche and Marie - Per Olov Enquist 18. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon 19. The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst 20. Vernon God Little - DBC Pierre 21. The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri 22. A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz 23. Lady Number Thirteen - Jose Carlos Somoza 24. The Successor - Ismail Kadare 25. Snow - Orhan Pamuk 26. Your Face Tomorrow - Javier Marias 27. I'm Not Scared - Niccolo Ammaniti 28. Soldiers of Salamis - Javier Cercas 29. Bartleby and Co. - Enrique Vila-Matas 30. In Search of Klingsor - Jorge Volpi 31. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender - Dubravka Ugresic 32. Pavel's Letters - Monika Moron 33. Dirty Havana Trilogy - Pedro Juan Gutierrez 34. Savage Detectives - Roberto Bolano 35. The Heretic - Miguel Delibes 36. Crossfire - Miyuki Miyabe 37. Margot and the Angels - Kristien Hemmerechts 38. Money to Burn - Ricardo Piglia 39. Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald 40. A Light Comedy - Eduardo Mendoza 41. Democracy - Joan Didion 42. The Late-Night News - Petros Markaris 43. Troubling Love - Elena Ferrante 44. Santa Evita - Tomas Eloy Martinez 45. Our Lady of the Assassins - Fernando Vallejo 46. The Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee 47. Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light - Ivan Klima 48. Remembering Babylon - David Malouf 49. The Twins - Tessa de Loo 50. Deep Rivers - Shusaku Endo 51. The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll - Alvaro Mutis 52. The Dumas Club - Arturo Perez-Reverte 53. The Triple Mirror of Self - Zulfikar Ghose 54. All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy 55. Memoirs of Rain - Sunetra Gupta 56. Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture - Apostolos Doxiadis 57. Before Night Falls - Reinaldo Arenas 58. Astradeni - Eugenia Fakinou 59. Faceless Killers - Henning Mankell 60. The Laws - Connie Palmen 61. The Daughter -Pavlos Matesis 62. The Shadow Lines - Amitav Ghosh 63. The Great Indian Novel - Shashi Tharoor 64. Gimmick! - Joost Zwagerman 65. Obabakoak - Bernardo Atxaga 66. Inland - Gerald Murnane 67. The First Garden - Anne Herbert 68. The Last World - Christoph Ransmayr 69. Paradise of the Blind - Duong Thu Huong 70. All Souls - Javier Marias 71. Black Box - Amos Oz 72. Ballad for Georg Henig - Viktor Paskov 73. Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto 74. Of Love and Shadows - Isabel Allende 75. The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman - Andrzej Szczypiorski 76. Ancestral Voices - Etienne van Heerden 77. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy 78. Annie John - Jamaica Kincaid 79. Simon and the Oak Trees - Marianne Fredriksson 80. Half of Man is Woman - Zhang Xianliang 81. Professor Martens' Departure - Jaan Kross 82. The Young Man - Botho Strauss 83. Love Medicine - Louise Erdrich 84. Larva: Midsummer Night's Babel - Julian Rios 85. The Witness - Juan Jose Saer 86. The Christmas Oratorio - Goran Tunstrom 87. Fado Alexandrino - Antonio Lobo Antunes 88. The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa 89. Baltazar and Bleminda - Jose Saramago 90. Memory of Fire - Eduardo Galeano 91. Couples, Passerby - Botho Strauss 92. The House with the Blind Glass Windows - Herbjorg Wassmo 93. The War of the End of the World - Mario Vargas Llosa 94. Leaden Wings - Zhang Jie 95. Clear Light of Day - Anita Desai 96. Smell of Sadness - Alfred Kossmann 97. Southern Seas - Manuel Vazquez Montalban 98. Fool's Gold - Maro Douka 99. So Long a Letter - Mariama Ba 100. A Dry White Season - Andre Brink 101. The Back Room - Carmen Martin Gaite 102. The Beggar Maid - Alice Munro 103. Requiem for a Dream- Hubert Selby Jr. 104. The Wars - Timothy Findley 105. Quartet in Autumn – Barbara Pym 106. The Engineer of Human Souls – Josef Skvorecky 107. Blaming - Elizabeth Taylor 108. Almost Transparent Blue – Ryu Murakami 109. Kiss of the Spider Woman - Manuel Puig 110. Woman at Point Zero - Nawal El Saadawi 111. The Commandant - Jessica Anderson 112. The Year of the Hare - Arto Paasilinna 113. The Port - Antun Šoljan 114. The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin 115. The Diviners - Margaret Laurence 116. Day of the Dolphin - Robert Merle 117. The Optimist's Daughter - Eudora Welty 118. The Twilight Years - Sawako Ariyoshi 119. Lives of Girls and Women - Alice Munro 120. Cataract – Mykhailo Osadchyi 121. A World for Julius - Alfredo Bryce Echenique 122. Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion 123. Fifth Business – Robertson Davies 124. Jacob the Liar – Jurek Becker 125. Here's to You, Jesusa - Elena Poniatowska 126. Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih 127. The Case Worker - Gyorgy Konrad 128. Moscow Stations - Venedikt Erofeyev 129. Heartbreak Tango - Manuel Puig 130. The Cathedral – Oles Honchar 131. The Manor - Isaac Bashevis Singer 132. Z – Vassilis Vassilikos 133. Miramar – Naguib Mahfouz 134. To Each His Own - Leonardo Sciascia 135. Marks of Identity - Juan Goytisolo 136. Silence – Shusaku Endo 137. Death and the Dervish - Mesa Selimovic 138. Closely Watched Trains - Bohumil Hrabal 139. Back to Oegstgeest - Jan Wolkers 140. Gardens, Ashes – Danilo Kis 141. Three Trapped Tigers - Guillermo Cabrera Infante 142. Dog Years – Gunter Grass 143. The Third Wedding - Costas Taktsis 144. Time of Silence – Luis Martin Santos 145. The Death of Artemio Cruz - Carlos Fuentes 146. The Time of the Hero - Mario Vargas Llosa 147. Memoirs of a Peasant Boy - Xose Neira Vilas 148. No One Writes to the Colonel - Gabriel García Márquez 149. The Shipyard - Juan Carlos Onetti 150. Bebo's Girl - Carlo Cassola 151. The Magician of Lublin - Isaac Bashevis Singer 152. God's Bits of Wood - Ousmane Sembene 153. Halftime – Martin Walser 154. Down Second Avenue - Es'kia Mphahlele 155. Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon - Jorge Amado 156. Deep Rivers - Jose Maria Arguedas 157. The Guide - R.K. Narayan 158. The Deadbeats - Ward Ruyslinck 159. The Birds - Tarjei Vesaas 160. The Glass Bees - Ernst Junger 161. The Manila Rope - Veijo Meri 162. The Devil to Pay in the Backlands - Joao Guimaraes Rosa 163. The Burning Plain - Juan Rulfo 164. The Tree of Man – Patrick White 165. The Mandarins – Simone de Beauvoir 166. A Day in Spring – Ciril Kosmac 167. Death in Rome – Wolfgang Koeppen 168. The Sound of Waves - Yukio Mishima 169. The Unknown Soldier - Vaino Linna 170. The Hothouse – Wolfgang Koeppen 171. The Lost Steps – Alejo Carpentier 172. The Dark Child – Camara Laye 173. Excellent Women - Barbara Pym 174. A Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata 175. The Hive - Camilo Jose Cela 176. Barabbas – Par Lagerkvist 177. The Guiltless – Hermann Broch 178. Ashes and Diamonds - Jerzy Andrzejewski 179. Journey to the Alcarria - Camilo Jose Cela 180. In The Heart of the Sea - Shmuel Yosef Agnon 181. This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen - Tadeusz Borowski 182. Froth on the Daydream - Boris Vian 183. Midaq Alley - Naguib Mahfouz 184. Zorba the Greek – Nikos Kazantzákis 185. House in the Uplands - Erskine Caldwell 186. Andrea – Carmen Laforet 187. Bosnian Chronicle - Ivo Andrić 188. The Death of Virgil - Hermann Broch 189. The Tin Flute – Gabrielle Roy 190. Pippi Longstocking - Astrid Lindgren 191. Chess Story (Royal Game) - Stefan Zweig 192. Broad and Alien is the World - Ciro Alegria 193. The Harvesters – Cesare Pavese 194. The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead 195. Alamut – Vladimir Bartol 196. On the Edge of Reason – Miroslav Krleza 197. The Blind Owl – Sadegh Hedayat 198. Ferdydurke – Witold Gombrowicz 199. War with the Newts – Karel Capek 200. Ricksaw Boy – Lao She 201. Untouchable - Mulk Raj Anand 202. The Bells of Basel – Louis Aragon 203. On the Heights of Despair – Emil Cioran 204. The Street of Crocodiles – Bruno Schulz 205. Man's Fate – André Malraux 206. Cheese – Willem Elsschot 207. Joseph and His Brothers – Thomas Mann 208. Viper's Tangle – Francois Mauriac 209. The Return of Philip Latinowicz – Miroslav Krleza 210. The Forbidden Realm - J. Slauerhoff 211. Insatiability - Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz 212. Monica – Saunders Lewis 213. I Thought of Daisy - Edmund Wilson 214. Retreat Without Song - Shahan Shahnur 215. Some Prefer Nettles - Junichiro Tanizaki 216. The Case of Sergeant Grischa - Arnold Zweig 217. Alberta and Jacob - Cora Sandel 218. Under Satan's Sun - Georges Bernanos 219. The New World - Henry Walda-Sellasse 220. Chaka the Zulu - Thomas Mofolo 221. The Forest and the Hanged - Liviu Rebreanu 222. Claudine's House - Colette 223. Kristin Lavransdatter - Sigrid Undset 224. Life of Christ - Giovanni Papini 225. The Storm of Steel - Ernst Junger 226. The Underdogs - Mariano Azuela 227. Pallieter - Felix Timmermans 228. The Home and the World - Rabindranath Tagore 229. Platero and I - Juan Ramon Jimenez 230. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge - Rainer Maria Rilke 231. Solitude - Victor Catala 232. The Way of All Flesh - Samuel Butler 233. The Call of the Wild - Jack London 234. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness - Daniel Paul Schreber 235. None But the Brave - Arthur Schnitzler 236. The Tigers of Momopracem - Emilio Salgari 237. Dom Casmurro - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis 238. Eclipse of the Crescent Moon - Geza Gardonyi 239. As a Man Grows Older - Italo Svevo 240. The Child of Pleasure - Gabriele D'Annunzio 241. Pharaoh - Boleslaw Prus 242. Compassion - Benito Perez Galdos 243. The Viceroys - Federico De Roberto 244. Down There - Joris-Karl Huysmans 245. Thais - Anatole France 246. Eline Vere - Louis Couperus 247. Under the Yoke - Ivan Vazov 248. The Manors of Ulloa - Emilia Pardo Bazan 249. The Quest - Frederik van Eeden 250. The Regent's Wife - Leopoldo Alas 251. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis 252. The Crime of Father Amaro - Jose Maria Eca de Queiros 253. Pepita Jimenez - Juan Valera 254. Martin Fierro - Jose Hernandez 255. Indian Summer - Adalbert Stifter 256. Green Henry - Gottfried Keller 257. The Devil's Pool - George Sand 258. Facundo - Domingo Faustino Sarmiento 259. A Hero of Our Times - Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov 260. Camera Obscura – Hildebrand (aka Nicolaas Beets) 261. The Lion of Flanders - Hendrik Conscience 262. Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin 263. A Life of a Good-for-Nothing - Joseph von Eichendorff 264. The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr - E.T.A. Hoffman 265. Michael Kohlhaas - Heinrich von Kleist 266. Henry von Ofterdingen - Novalis 267. A Dream of Red Mansions – Cao Xueqin 268. Anton Reiser - Karl Philipp Moritz 269. The Adventures of Simplicissimus – Hans von Grimmelshausen 270. The Conquest of New Spain – Bernal Diaz del Castillo 271. The Travels of Persiles and Sigismunda – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 272. Thomas of Reading – Thomas Deloney 273. Monkey: Journey to the West – Wu Cheng'en 274. The Lusiad – Luis Vaz de Camoes 275. The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes - Anonymous 276. Amadis of Gaul - Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo 277. Le Celestina – Fernando de Rojas 278. Tirant lo Blanc – Joanot Martorell 279. Romance of the Three Kingdoms – Luo Guanzhong 280. The Water Margin – Shi Nai'an 281. The Tale of Genji – Murasaki Shikibu 282. The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter - Anonymous Then, only two years later, a third edition, another revamp, but only ELEVEN titles were changed … that’s weird! IN 1. Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery 2. The Children's Book - A.S. Byatt 3. Invisible - Paul Auster 4. An American Rust - Philipp Meyer 5. Cost - Roxana Robinson 6. The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga 7. Home - Marilynne Robinson 8. Kieron Smith, Boy - James Kelman 9. The Gathering - Anne Enright 10. The Blind Side of the Heart - Julia Franck 11. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz OUT 1. The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid 2. Animal's People - Indra Sinha 3. The Kindly Ones - Jonathan Littell 4. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian - Marina Lewycka 5. Small Island - Andrea Levy 6. The Plot Against America - Philip Roth 7. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon 8. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon 9. Islands - Dan Sleigh 10. The Heart of Redness - Zakes Mda 11. Small Remedies - Shashi Deshpande AND NOW A REVIEW OF THE ACTUAL BOOK This is like porn for us book-geek types, it's so pretty and it's full of sexy pix of books in all states of dress, some with their jackets on, some off, some bound, some unbound. And lotsa pix of authors too, although, you know, authors are usually not the most gorgeous of people, and if you think that's stereotypical this book is here to prove it. (Exception : Edna O'Brien, total babe.) Anyway, this 1001 Books tome did turn my head when it was first published. It didn't, however, make me read anything I wasn't going to, which I guess is its point. Or maybe, its point is just to lie in the corner of your room and purr. Everybody will be shouting at this book before long as they look through it along the lines of "what's this? You've got three in here by Douglas Adams, and NONE by Roddy Doyle? you arrant dunderheads!" I mean, Douglas Adams is good for one, but not three... And if Douglas Adams, then Garrison Keillor... Each book gets about 300 words which editor Peter Boxall describes like this : "What each entry does is to respond, with the cramped urgency of a deathbed confession, to what makes each novel compelling, to what it is about each novel that makes one absolutely need to read it." But, you know, they don't actually do that. It's just another pretty lie. 1001 books - it's a lot. If you had the time and money to read every one at a rate of one per week, you'd need 19 and a quarter years, so you better get going. But unless you're in a cult, you aren't going to do that. The pre-1700 section, in particular, is strictly for students of literature - I stick my neck out and say that very few will be reading "Euphues : The Anatomy of Wit" by John Lyly or "Aithiopika" by Heliodorus for fun. And then the dogged reader will be coming up against the rarely-scaled Everests of literature such as Dorothy Richardson's "Pilgrimage" (13 vols, thousands of pages) or Proust (likewise) or "Infinite Jest" (one volume, 1100 pages). Each of which are going to take you 3-6 months solid. Rules are broken randomly - the word "books" certainly appears to equate to "novels" in here, BUT "Like Life" by Lorrie Moore is included - a collection of short stories, not a novel. So okay - why no Raymond Carver, America's greatest short story writer? Stupid bastards. And sometimes it's hard to see that the reviewer even likes the book in question - "The Secret History" is described as "quality trash for highbrows"! Or take this: "As with his other writing `The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' raises questions about the representation of female characters, and invites accusations of latent misogyny. These are valid objections that may engender fruitful considerations of this novel as a historical document as much as a work of experimental fiction." Well, that's hardly an enthusiastic endorsement. Some authors are wildly over-represented, such as J M Coatzee, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster, all of which have more titles in here than Henry James. It's interesting to check if the Booker Prizewinners are included - 20 are out of 37 and there are some strange omissions - no room for "Vernon God Little" (quite right too) or "The True History of the Kelly Gang", "Sacred Hunger" (nothing at all by Barry Unsworth in fact - what's wrong with him, he's great, you dunderheads!), "The Famished Road" or "Hotel du Lac". So this is a guide with enough in it to get everyone's backs up and please hardly anyone except Coatzee and McEwan fans. Therefore I recommend it for everyone, but particularly those who have just been sentenced to a long stretch of solitary confinement. Having said that, please check out my GR friend Ellen's fantastically vitriolic review - I don't agree with her but her views are BRACING http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... ...more |
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Sep 26, 2007
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